She has not slept all night.
She has not dared to sleep, for fear of not leaving in time. She has no alarm clock because her mother has always woken her, and anyway, an alarm clock would wake her parents as well as herself. She cannot go downstairs to look at the clock on the mantelpiece because they would hear her and Mum would get out of bed whatever time it was, and come downstairs in her dressing gown and ask what was going on, why was she up so early, was she ill, would she like a cup of tea? And she would escort her back to bed, and come into her room, and maybe notice the rucksack, and then what? So she has not slept all night, but has sat on her bed, in the dark, lights off because sometimes Daddy gets up in the night and he would see the light under her door and open it to see why was she still awake, or why is she wasting electricity by not turning off her light. So she has sat in the dark, quietly. At least, it was dark at first, as she sat there, dressed except for her shoes, but her eyes have become accustomed to it and the street light makes the curtains glow orange, so she has very carefully opened the curtains – they have been her bedroom curtains since Daddy decorated her room when she was fourteen – and by the orange light she can make out most of the things in the room. Although she knows them all so well that there is no need to look; she could enumerate her possessions in her sleep if necessary.
There is her bed. It might be a poor bed with a thin and worn mattress but she does not know this as it is the only bed she has ever slept in, if you don’t count going to a seaside boarding house two or three times as a child, and two nights in hospital having her tonsils out when she was six. The covers, however, are lavish and new: Egyptian cotton sheets and pillow cases, carefully laundered in the twin- tub every Monday morning, two wool blankets, a quilted eiderdown of different shades of pink and, folded at the end of the bed, a candlewick bedspread, white with a design of leaves and flowers in green and purple. Her pillow is thin though, barely thick enough to raise her head at all, but that is because at the age of fourteen she had been anxious about getting a double chin and had taken to sleeping with no pillow at all. This thin, limp excuse for a proper pillow is the compromise she and her mother reached back then – and it must have worked, because there is no sign on her of a double chin.
There is a dressing table, which has served her also as a desk through her school years. She could look up from her maths homework, or her geography revision and contemplate her reflection in the triple mirror, her limp dark brown hair that would neither hold a curl nor fall straight, her dark eyebrows that – she thought – made her whole face shadowy, her smile that showed a crooked front tooth that slightly crossed over the one beside it. Daddy, on several occasions, opening her door and finding her studying herself, not her books, threatened to take her mirrors away and for weeks she came home from school every day worried that he might have done it. But he never did, and maybe never intended to. She can see herself now, dimly in the glass, her face pale against the bedhead, her knees drawn up, her arms circling her legs. Not smiling now.
Underneath her bedsprings is the rucksack. She had to wait for a time when her mother was out shopping and her father was at work to go up to the attic and bring down the rucksack. That is two days ago, and she has worried ever since that her mother might come in and clean under her bed and find it, and ask questions, and discover everything. And stop her. The attic is where her brother used to sleep before he left. When he went – almost eight years ago now – when it was clear that he wasn’t going to come back she asked if she could have the attic room, which was bigger than hers, and more private, being at the top of a steep staircase. But no, it wasn’t allowed. Why not? Well, he might come back after all. And it was hard work for Mummy to take the vacuum upstairs, never mind the clean sheets and the clean clothes and such. Her mother said she didn’t mind that so much, but she would worry if Sally-Ann was so far away from her. What if she was ill in the night?
‘I’m not going to be ill,’ said Sally-Ann.
‘But you don’t want your mother to be worrying, do you?’
She knows – or thinks she knows – why they didn’t want her up there. For her mother, it was the idea that her brother might yet come home. He might yet, whatever he had said to the contrary, be persuaded to leave his wife and their maybe baby and come back where he belonged. For her father, it was the equally unfounded and even more superstitious idea that if she, Sally-Ann, moved up to the attic, then she would also end up leaving home, and not in the good, socially acceptable, properly approved way of being given away, in a church, in a virginal long dress, by her father, to some respectable young man who would be thereafter responsible for her continuing socially acceptable place in the world. These were not, back then, thoughts she could put into words so she had sulked more than usual, and that was when her mother persuaded her father to use a week of his fortnight’s holiday, when the works closed down, to redecorate her bedroom. Even during the painting and the papering she was not allowed to sleep in the attic, where there was a perfectly serviceable bed, but slept on her own mattress on the floor of her parents’ room, lying there awake until they came to bed, pretending to be asleep while listening to them getting undressed and dressed again in nightclothes, settling down for the night, the springs boinging as her mother – who was the heavier – got into bed. Then the slower breathing as they relaxed into sleep and later, when her father rolled unconsciously onto his back, the snores that woke her mother and made her dig him in the ribs and tell him to ‘Turn over for goodness sake. You’ll wake our Sally-Ann.’
Her best friend Marion, who lived across the road and was in the same class at school, pretended to be shocked at the thought of her sharing her parents’ bedroom, because what if they wanted to do it? ‘I don’t think,’ Sally said, ‘that there’s anything like that. They’re quite old you know. And my mother is quite fat.’ ‘So?’ said Marion.
She must have closed her eyes, or even dozed off for a few minutes, because now and then her head drops forward on to her knees and she wakes without knowing she was asleep. She squints to look at her watch – it is a little gold one, very ladylike, that was her present last birthday from her parents. Until then she did not have a watch of her own but borrowed her mother’s little Timex when she needed one, which was not that often. After all, in the library, there was the clock above the door, as big as the one at the railway station, ticking importantly; at home there was the alarm clock on the kitchen dresser, that her mother took upstairs every night and brought down every morning, and in the front room the eight-day clock on the mantelpiece that was wound on Sunday nights. And although she has worn her watch as was expected of her, she does not like it; it is too delicate for her, it makes her wrist look ridiculously masculine by contrast, it makes her want to sit on her hands to hide them. She would leave it behind if she could, but she reminds herself that there is a complicated journey ahead. She takes it off, and puts it on again, and squints at it in the orange darkness. It is not time to move yet, the sky has not begun to get lighter.
The rucksack will not be light either. She is worried that she will not get it down the stairs without it bumping noisily. She has wanted to do a practice run, but there was never a time when her mother was sufficiently far away to not notice. Just packing it has been an undercover operation, since she shares her mother’s wardrobe space and has had to make covert visits to their bedroom to extract her clothes. She is not sure, even now, that she has packed the right things, or enough of them, or too many. Three dresses, one of them her best dress – is that too many? Or not enough? What will she be doing to need dresses? But you never know. Better to err on the cautious side. Her winter coat is at the bottom, taking up a lot of room, but she has thought it through – you never know how cold it might be, especially if, as she fears but thinks possible, there might come a time when she cannot find a bed for the night. She is not at all sure, if that happens, where she might go, but she knows enough to know that at some time she will need her winter coat.
Acquiring all the necessary bits and pieces – that has taken some thinking about too. She couldn’t pack her toothbrush because its absence would be noticed, so she had to buy a new one. Likewise soap, a flannel, shampoo, a towel. Two big packets of Tampax because who knows whether she can buy them there, and if she could, what they are called. She has put in some paper and envelopes so that she can write to her parents, and to Marion, and a notebook so that she can record where she’s been. Her Youth Hostel membership – not delivered to her home but to her place of work – and her pink card, one year only passport are in the most secure looking of the pockets, and her money she is intending to keep close by her, in her shoulder bag. Oh, the worry and the wondering and the planning, the lists she has made, and hidden, and finally disposed of at work where no one would suspect. And the excitement too, the secret, the deception. The letter.
‘Dear Mum and Daddy,’ says the letter. ‘Please don’t worry about me, I have gone to visit a friend. I will send you a postcard from the coast and see you again soon. Love from Sally-Ann.’ It is on her dressing table, in an envelope, under a magazine so that it cannot be seen by her mother coming unexpectedly into the room. She will leave it visibly at the top of the stairs; it will slow her mother down a bit before she comes to the kitchen and finds the back door unlocked.
They will think she has gone to see Marion, who is, as far as they know, her only friend, and is working for the summer as a hairdresser at Pontin’s Holiday camp in Great Yarmouth. They will wonder why she hasn’t told them of her plans, they might even try to contact Marion through her mother, but they won’t worry too much, not yet. She is after all, of age, almost, a grown woman, as her father repeatedly tells her, when he gets exasperated, when she is what he calls ‘a noddy numbskull.’
The room is now perceptibly lighter. Then the street light switches itself off and the room is dark for a few moments. It is time to go.She pulls out, as silently as she can, the rucksack from under the bed. She opens her door as soundlessly as possible. She puts the letter on the landing floor. She grasps the rucksack to her chest and, barefooted, descends the stairs. They are steep – but she has been up and down them a dozen times a day since she was a tiny child; she could do it in the dark, in her sleep, in her dreams. Her shoes are by the back door, she slips them on. She turns the key in the lock, she opens the door, hurrying now, trembling, and closes it behind her as gently as she can with shaking fingers. Still hugging the rucksack she goes into the yard, out into the back gennel, along to the road. The road is empty. Not even a milkman is about. Once round the corner she stops and puts the rucksack on a wall so that she can get her arms through the straps. It is heavier than she thought it would be and she staggers a little as she moves outwards.
She is away.
